market positioning

I have been using my last name with lawn and landscape, and now I want to create a new professional name for my business. I'm trying to decide how to position and market myself, I can do the following:

Name of my business with focus on lighting and offer lawn care as a service, or put both lighting and lawns in the title. Or just lawn & landscape, and offer lights as a service.

Sounds like an easy decision, but it's not, and it's keeping me from getting new business cards made up, etc. I want to position myself as soon as possible as a lighting guy.

I moved to a new area last August, and it might be a good opportunity to switch to a more professional sounding name with a logo. Especially becuase I've been doing this part time, and I want to be full-time one year from this date.

Maybe I should just stick with my name for now, and wait for my business to dictate my direction (that was my original plan). But I am very impressed with the names and logo's I see on this forum.

Mike, I was an electrician for a long time before I started the landscape lighting devision, which took over the company. When I decided to change the name to NightScapes, I included my old company name, PRG Ventures. The new name was NightScapes by PRG Ventures. PRG Ventures was very well known in my area and people knew right away who NightScapes was. Now I have dropped PRG Ventures from the name as I no longer need to be associated with my old company and NightScapes is now a much stronger company than PRG Ventures ever was.

I will just say that if you are considering changing the name it will be better to do it sooner than later. Name branding, business cards, brochures, phonebooks, postcards, etc.... this all has shelf life: People will sometimes hold on to information for months (even years) before responding and acting on a referral or piece of advertisment. The cost associated with changing your name can be staggering. Everything has to be changed. Are you incorporated? Lot's to do there also. If your going to do it, go ahead and do it.

Okay, in the end, I hope to be exclusively lighting. There will be a transition period where I will rely on quick-to-acquire, bread-and-butter reliable cash flow lawn accounts.

I guess, based on feedback, I should develop a long term name and logo, and maybe just add the line "full servivce lawn care" in my body text. I can even headline that on door hangers for new lawn accounts.

Niche specialization is highly recommended. Those that do enough volume to justify and whose primary business is other than landscape lighting should "split off" a landscape lighting division with it's own name and identity.

Coming up with the right name for your business is probably the most important decision you will make. It should reflect your branding and services. Ideally, you should choose a name thats:

1) Available to register in your County or Town.
2) Available to register a domain name for a website
3) Available to Trademark as a service (SM) Service Mark.

If your lucky enough to get all three with the same name, then thats really something to be happy about. The fourth would be getting a Email address and your domain name (not some stupid AOL or Hotmail).